🌐 How Iranians Are Bypassing Internet Censorship With Satellite TV

Iran, a country of 90 million, has now gone 48 days without internet. Authorities have been restricting access to the global web since January. The shutdowns started amid protests, then continued as armed conflict escalated. For most Iranians, the only way to get information from the outside world has become "digital smuggling" through ordinary satellite TV dishes.

🔄 The Toosheh system (Farsi for "backpack") was launched in 2015 by Iranian dissidents behind a Los Angeles-based project called Net Freedom Pioneers. It runs over a satellite TV channel—and despite being officially banned, satellite dishes are found in 50–70% of Iranian homes.

To receive files, users plug a USB drive into their satellite receiver and record the broadcast, which repeats every hour. What ends up on the drive looks like a regular MPEG video file, but it contains hidden data. A special program can then extract it.

This is how Iranians get news digests, broadcast recordings, VPN clients, music, and educational videos — anything that doesn't make it past the censors. A single broadcast carries roughly 1–5 GB of content. The one catch: Toosheh is one-way only, so there's no way to send anything or make requests.

✖️ Receiving this kind of signal is technically hard to trace or block, from the outside, it looks just like a regular TV broadcast. The only real countermeasure would be targeted jamming of a specific satellite in orbit. Still, Iran's authorities have held back from doing that, fearing international sanctions.

💰 Renting airtime on a TV satellite starts at around $100,000 a year. Back in 2016, the project's founders told reporters that it was funded by both public and private sponsors, while stressing that no outside party has any say over what content gets broadcast through the system.

Do you have a satellite dish at home?

❤️ — Yes
🔥 — No
🤔 — Maybe it's time to get one...

@hiaimediaen